Re:effectiveness of echelon (Score 1)

well, it is of course true that few people have always on data and voice streams. this reduces the amount of data-to-filter considerably. but your comments on deep analysis and other forms of intelligence are less obviously correct, to me. certainly a filtering process can be used to bring the most interesting candidates to the top, but the basic lowest-level scanning process still has to be done to convert the continuous speech to text, overcome encryption, etc. and this is definitely not an easy task. the number-of-workstations idea is just to give an idea of the kind of computing power needed. special purpose DSPs could probably help out a lot on the voice processing part, but there is still a huge amount of higher level processing going on just to convert the digitized voice to phonemes and recognizable words. i don't know how much of this could be optimized for special purpose hardware. again, this is all very generalized to give us an idea of the feasibility of such a thing. most variations and specific exceptions can be swept under the rug of -this-is-an-average-estimate-and-i-hope-it-doesn't -suck-too-bad-. it still seems orders of magnitude too much work to be worthwhile...